I've been looking at a lot of listings for "Battleground Fantasy Warfare" on Amazon and on BGG but I can't tell which is the base game. Is there a base game? Which items should I buy first if I want to keep my costs low?

To play, all you need are two starter decks for any two factions. There is no "base game." Pick whichever two factions sound most interesting to you, then buy the starter decks. There are also reinforcement decks for each faction, but those just add things to starter decks and aren't enough to play by themselves.

Marcus from Your Move Games here. Eric is correct in that there is no base game. You select a faction and go with it! All you need is a starter deck. While it's recommended that you get 2 starter decks of different factions, you can indeed do it on the cheap and play against another player using a single starter deck. Both players simply draw from the same command deck. However, since both starter and reinforcement decks retail at $15 each, you might as well go for the gusto and get more than one (see below). If you are looking for good "beginner" factions, I'd either go with Orcs, Lizardmen, or Dwarves. You don't need to be extraordinarily tricky to learn and play well with those particular factions.

The ownership of Your Move Games has changed hands recently and we've revamped the web site, forged new deals with online distributors, and begun work on new factions. We currently have 11 fantasy factions and 4 historical factions. Note that the historical factions use the same rule set as the fantasy factions and they are fully compatible with each other. So if you want to see how Carthage fares against an army of High Elves, go nuts. But we're not releasing a true new version. What we are doing is updating the rule book to fix a few inadequacies and the updated 4.0 rulebook will be available when the new factions are released. Hopefully sometime in 2017. For now, you can order any of our Battleground: Fantasy/Historical Warfare products through our site along with other products we carry. Cheers!